Design for sustainability in education

While the potential for designers to affect positive change is significant and widely acknowledged, this has remained largely untapped both within industry and education. Although some new educational curricula with environmental emphasis have begun to be developed and implemented. But this is barely a beginning and the new generation of designers still needs to be more educated in sustainability. Current design education have been rarely recognized as a relevant factor in the sustainability discourse. Furthermore, the educational practices are mostly related to eco-design strategies (e.g. energy efficiency, dematerialization, longevity, use of recycled materials, recycling). But Design for Sustainability (DfS) goes beyond the eco-design. DfS integrates social, economic, environmental and institutional aspects. Hence, it is necessary to expand the scope of design education and practice beyond style, fashion or limited trends of environmental concerns to include behavioral, social, institutional issues. Accordingly, an educational experiment is undertaken by the industrial design students of the Art University of Isfahan, Iran which provides a more coherent framework for sustainable design education. Students have the responsibility to not only include ecodesign strategies but also establish Design for Sustainability which promote socially responsible behavior among people. The paper contributes to the knowledge and experience on how integration of sustainability issues in regular product design courses can be accomplished the design activity in order to positively and effectively contribute to the radical change required by the transition towards a sustainable society. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Diamond Congress Ltd., Budapest University of Technology and Economics Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Creative Construction Conference 2018.